For many years, employment agencies (sometimes called search firms) have been attempting to match job candidates to specific job criteria as required by employers. Most employment agencies receive payment only for those positions which they fill with qualified employee candidates. Therefore, in a highly competitive environment, speed in identifying and presenting candidates and presenting to potential employers is very important. It is also extremely important to be able to handle a large number of potential candidates in various fields in order to be in the best position to fill employers' job requirements as they open.
The most commonly known method of matching personnel to job specification criteria requires a person trained in job placement skills to manually review documents such as resumes and other qualifications related documents while comparing such documents to criteria specified by the potential employer. Such a manual system has several drawbacks. It is obviously very slow in most cases since there is no fast way to sort unqualified candidates from qualified candidates on a large-scale basis. In addition, it can be very time-consuming and therefore quite costly. Further, the amount of applicants may be limited if much of the information about the candidates must be remembered by the search consultants themselves. The amount of candidates may also be limited by the factors such as the geographical location of the job placement center, interpersonal skills of the interviewer, and failure to widely distribute notice of the available position or failure to distribute notice to the appropriate group of individuals. Use of such a system makes it difficult to identify and present a list of qualified candidates together with resumes and other needed information to the requestor in a short period of time.
Some automated systems for selecting personnel based on job criteria do exist. The majority of these systems merely store information regarding the qualifications of various candidates in a computer database as, for example, in the form of resumes. The searcher then types in certain key words which relate to the job qualification criteria hoping to match the key words with the job criteria. Such systems are limited by the fact that the use of keywords is very imprecise. This is due to the fact that job titles and, in particular, technological slang terms or “buzz” words have meanings which vary quite extensively from employer to employer and from one region to another. Further, such systems are not “user friendly” because they often require significant training and experience with the system before it can be used effectively. Such systems are further limited by misspellings which can commonly occur in large databases and which may cause candidates to be missed by a key word approach. Furthermore, these systems lack automated methods for immediately determining whether each candidate applying for a position meets the criterion for that particular position, while the application process is still being completed.
High speed, a low cost to hire, and quality candidates are the keys to any successful recruitment program in today's rapid-fire employment market. Downloading resumes from a database saves time but there remains a need for a resume screening process that utilizes an understanding of the available position, the respective business and employer's needs to select suitable candidates for employment.